First, Ustream has landed $6 million in fresh funding from two existing investors, DCM and Softbank. This adds onto the $10 million Ustream garnered last month from Korea Telecom to establish a joint venture in Seoul. But relatively, the new $6 million is a drop in the bucket for the company, which to date has raised more than $100 million in venture capital.

Ustream co-founder John Ham has left the CEO post

Secondly, Ustream Co-Founder John Ham has stepped down from his role as CEO of the company. In a press release, Ustream indicated Ham is leaving to “return to his entrepreneurial roots” — and TechCrunch reported earlier today that he is soon to launch a new startup. Ham will continue to serve as Ustream’s chairman.

That means Ustream is currently on the hunt for a new CEO. Ustream Co-Founder Brad Hunstable will occupy the CEO position on an interim basis as the executive search is conducted, the company says.

At five years old, Ustream is practically an old-timer in the world of online video, so the company is ripe for a shakeup of some sort. Hunstable said in a recent interview with GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler that Ustream is aware of mounting competition from both fledgling startups as well as tech industry giants such as YouTube, saying, “We know what everyone’s doing because, you know, only the paranoid survive. But you can’t be frozen by fear.” The executive level shuffling shows that Ustream is indeed not afraid to change — how it will all work out for the company, of course, remains to be seen.

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And because you can’t have a tech blog these days without some sort of video component, this fall Betabeat has launched its first original web series, The Pitch, which does that show-not-tell thing to illustrate the process of pitching a startup concept to venture capitalists.

Essentially a competitive reality show with a strong documentary influence, The Pitch focuses on eight “Silicon Alley” entrepreneurs, who get the chance to pitch venture capitalists Ben Lerer and Jordan Cooper of Lerer Ventures with their apps or services.

In the current phase of the show, each episode introduces one of the startup ideas in contention, as well as the team behind it, who are then filmed pitching to Lerer and Cooper. Lerer and Cooper give their honest feedback on the idea both directly to the startups in an interview segment. Later, three finalists will be selected not only for potential investment, but a cash prize — the value of which has yet to be determined, though Betabeat editor Ben Popper, in a phone interview, says it’ll be “substantial.”

So far, the profiles, while maybe a bit too slow-paced, are a nice mix of technology proposal and personal details — the guys behind Olapic don’t want to say much about the Vegas trip that inspired their photo-sharing application, while the duo behind a gamification concept tell the story of they met via their respective blogs. And the VCs themselves seem very comfortable doing what they do for a living on camera.

Because, in a sense, they are doing what they do for a living — listening to and judging startup pitches they might potentially invest in; Lerer and Cooper are even continuing to follow up on some of the pitches they’ve heard. The only artificial element of The Pitch, according to Popper, is the selection of the contestants, which he and director Brian Spinks picked; otherwise, the show is just there to observe what happens.

While The Real World seeks out drunken crazies to create conflict, Popper’s focus in casting the show was to find early stage companies that seemed innovative, and also reflected the geographic diversity of founders now living in New York. Of course, when you consider how many startup founders are gambling everything on this one idea, there’s really no need to add additional drama.

Popper said that narrowing the field from over a hundred submissions to the featured eight meant he “got to practice being a VC.” Which brings up an issue that’s been debated recently in the tech blog world — specifically, the overlap between journalist and venture capitalist, highlighted by Michael Arrington’s dramatic departure from Techcrunch to found CrunchFund, and Techcrunch writer MG Siegler joining Crunchfund as a VC shortly after.

The Pitch, of course, is merely documenting venture capitalists at work, but from his point of view, there’s still an overlap. “Being a journalist and a VC aren’t so different,” he said. “We both want to know about new companies first.”

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Glickman stepped down from the CEO role at online ad startup Tremor Media after the company merged with competitor ScanScout late last year. He handed the reins over to ScanScout CEO Bill Day, who handles day-to-day operations, while taking the executive chairman title. But Glickman has been working on Connected Sports since April, according to his LinkedIn profile.

We reached out to Glickman to find out more about the new startup, but he didn’t provide very much detail, except to say that the company will release product in beta by the end of the year. But here’s how the Connected Sports website explains what they’re up to:

“We build cutting edge applications for Connected TVs and second screen devices that turn watching live sports into an interactive experience. By combining real-time social and gaming functionality with the TV broadcast, we blur the line between watching and playing. Your living room will never be the same!”

We were also able to piece together some additional details about the company, based on publicly available information from around the web. For instance, joining Glickman at Connected Sports are co-founders Tim Walling, who previously worked as a software engineer for Brightcove; and Bertrand Navarrete, formerly VP of acquisitions and venture partner at Internet Capital Group.

Based on job postings at Startuply, Connected Sports currently has eight employees, split evenly between Princeton, N.J. and Cambridge, Mass. It’s currently looking for a lead UI designer, as well as JavaScript architects and engineers.

According to AngelList, Progress Ventures General Partner Nick MacShane is an investor in the startup. MacShane had previously invested in Tremor, as well as Mediamath and Media6degrees, among others.

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Storytree, which is launching at the 500 Startups demo day Tuesday, was borne out of founder Matt Sullivan’s time at the Stanford d.school. The project emerged out of his Master’s thesis, which was centered on finding ways for the elderly to share their wealth of rich family stories. In a phone interview, Sullivan said he spent a lot of time at retirement homes, and found there were few tools available that made it easy for them to do so.

Originally the team, which is made up of Sullivan and co-founder Zach Weiner, were thinking about a system that would have family members mailing cheap video cameras to each other and to “hubs” where the videos would be uploaded, put together and made into DVDs that could be shared. But the web and mobile apps offered a cheaper and quicker way for family members to communicate.

With Storytree, users can create private pages, then tell their own stories through pictures, audio and video, which they can then share with friends or family. Or they can ask other members to contribute their own stories by emailing them. The whole system works entirely in the web browser, letting a user record a video memory with a webcam or record audio from his or her computer’s built-in mic. Soon, Storytree will also have an iPhone app, allowing users to record and add to their stories from the mobile phone. The hope is to get users to share stories based on “trigger events,” like a wedding or birth of a child, to share stories.

While the company is still in beta, it’s exploring different revenue models. Sullivan said he was considering a freemium model whereby subscription users would get additional features, like the ability to export to DVD. The company is also looking to make its platform available for larger organizations to aggregate video memories of regular users.

Storytree has received some funding as part of the 500 Startups accelerator program, as well as the program’s Design Fund. The startup has two full-time employees — Sullivan and Weiner — but is looking to raise more money and expand its team.

Storytree: Remember the Time from StoryTree on Vimeo.

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Last month, Jonathan Nail, the writer, creator and star of the independently produced Solo, announced that he and his team would not be producing anymore episodes of the sci-fi comedy series. The blog post announcing the decision is a heartfelt thank-you letter to everyone who was involved in the show’s production, but it doesn’t go into detail about the reasons behind Nail’s decision. However, those reasons, as Nail explained during a phone interview, aren’t hard to guess: Like many who bet their time and money on creating an original series, Nail was dissatisfied with producing his own content and receiving minimal reward, and as a result he has decided to move on.

Nail was inspired to create Solo in early 2009, after seeing the success of The Guild and then discovering some of the other content being produced independently at that time. “I didn’t think it was going to be my Sling Blade,” he said (referring to the 1996 film that made Billy Bob Thornton a star), “but the concept hit me pretty strongly, and I realized I either had to put up or shut up.”

After several months of preproduction, three episodes of Solo were shot in the fall of 2009, then released in July 2010. After a second round of production, the remaining six episodes were released beginning on April 15. The total price tag, according to Nail? Approximately $20,000.

Part of that amount, $7,300, came from a crowd-sourcing campaign to fund the second round of production, and in addition, a sponsorship deal with DataDirect Networks provided funds for the show to give away five Apple TVs and an iPad. But Nail bore no small percentage of the budget, including an initial investment of $3,000, $2,500 for set construction and $2,000 for merchandise that, as of writing, remains unsold. Even Nail’s parents chipped in some cash.

Nail attempted to cut as many corners as possible. For example, he and his wife lowered the catering budget by personally cooking meals for the crew, most of whom were donating their time. But factors like travel expenses (when Solo was screened at the New York Television Festival) and paying for equipment rentals, post-production work and on-set sound guys (there is no such thing as a sound guy who works for free, at least in Los Angeles) worked against him.

Did Nail expect to make that money back? “I knew there was going to be some loss, but I was only looking at the success that The Guild was having — I wasn’t paying attention to the fact that no one is really making money in this space,” he said. “Naively, I thought that this could get picked up somewhere like SyFy and I would make some of that money back, or that the audience would support it so I wouldn’t have to invest any more of my money.” As mentioned before, the Solo audience did contribute financially to the show’s production — but the audience, despite being extremely loyal, wasn’t large enough to make that sustainable in the long term.

There were burdens beyond the financial cost, as well. One of Nail’s main reasons for creating Solo was to give him a spotlight for his acting talents (his credits include appearances on ER, Criminal Minds and Mad Men); however, he found that acting was less than 10 percent of the work involved and that producing duties were beyond what he’d anticipated.

“You have to be aware that you will be biting off more than you can chew at first,” he said. “If you want to be an actor, act. If you want to be a producer, produce. I don’t want to discourage anyone, but there’s a lot more work than you’ll expect there to be.”

One element that proved difficult was the search for sponsorship. The DataDirect deal came about through a friend who worked there and knew that the company was looking to sponsor an online series; but other efforts to find a sponsor were unsuccessful.

“Here’s the thing most people don’t understand about sponsors — they don’t deal with budgets that small, and if you can’t show them that you’ve got 100,000 views, they’re not interested in talking to you,” Nail said. “You pretty much have to have proven yourself already.”

Looking back, Nail acknowledged several issues that might have affected Solo‘s ability to reach an audience, including the gap between the first three and final six episodes that slowed the show’s momentum. But he also considered the current state of web content to be a factor.

“Web series are kind of the 99-seat theater of the entertainment world. We’re all promoting to ourselves,” he said. “It takes a lot of time and money to break out of the atmosphere of this world we’ve created.”

That said, when Nail announced the end of Solo, he was happily surprised by the outpouring of support from the web series community, much of which came from producers “who knew how hard this is.” As one producer told him, “It’s always going to be [online]. You’ll always have something to be proud of.” And he looks forward to acting in future web content — just not producing any of it himself.

One positive consequence of moving on: The Nails now have a place to park their car. Over the course of five months in 2009, Nail and his crew built the show’s primary set — the spaceship’s control room — in Nail’s garage, and it remained there until two weeks ago, when Nail and three friends finally took it down. A standing set company in Anaheim, Calif., was at one point interested in buying it, but the deal fell through; instead, Nail now has approximately $600 worth of good quality wood to use on another project. “I can use it to build a shed, or a playhouse for my girls,” he said.

“Taking down the set was very cathartic,” he added. “I had a smile on my face the whole time.”

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Now one startup is looking to provide an alternative: Boulder, Colo.–based Flixmaster offers a platform for publishers like transmedia creators and interactive advertisers that provides most of the functionality that they desire, without requiring them to shell out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to build custom experiences.

Flixmaster’s platform includes a drag-and-drop interface that allows viewers to drag icons between video thumbnails and create “branching” connections between clips. Flixmaster thus creates a structure for the videos and auto-populates them with interactive buttons that viewers can choose between while watching a video clip. Users of the Flixmaster platform can edit and customized them to change their in and out points, look and feel, positioning and text of the buttons.

Founder Cameron McCaddon, who previously worked in casual and online gaming, said the startup wanted to make sure from the beginning that it would be “really, really easy to use.” Hence the drag-and-drop interface. But if a user wants to get more creative in building an interactive story line, Flixmaster offers more-advanced customization.

Interestingly enough, the video experiences that Flixmaster creates are built in HTML5, with Flash used only as a fallback option when an HTML5 player isn’t available. The decision to go with HTML5, according to McCaddon, was made in part because the firm expects mobile viewing to become huge over the coming years. Because Flash isn’t available on Apple iOS devices like iPhones and iPads, the Flixmaster team made a bet on HTML5 instead. For Flixmaster, it was a decision between building for now or building for the future.

“HTML5 seems to be very trendy right now,” McCaddon said. “The industry seems to be siding that way, at least for the time being. We see Flash’s market share declining while HTML5 is growing.”

Flixmaster is currently in beta testing, with about 75 clients using its platform. It’s still working on its pricing, but it expects to create a group of tiered pricing plans that will depend on available features, number of videos uploaded, depth of analytics and number of users per account.

The startup has five full-time employees (and some contractors), and it is being bootstrapped using an initial $250,000 investment from a group of angel investors. Flixmaster is part of the current class of startups in the TechStars Boulder incubator, which has its demo day this Thursday.

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What’s missing from the growing mass of Internet video is the content from local affiliate stations. Local news, local sports and local weather — the hallmarks of most broadcast content across the country — aren’t available online. But due to the contracts they’ve agreed to, affiliate stations aren’t able to stream their programming unless they can show that it is only being viewed by households in their local market. That is, a local Nashville station can’t stream its programming widely online; otherwise a viewer in Cincinnati might tune in.

And as more network programming shows up online, viewers have less reason to tune into the live broadcasts. That means affiliates are missing out on revenue from local ads that keep them going. At the same time that the networks are offering up video for free online, they are seeking reverse compensation from local broadcasters for carrying their programming. The local affiliates, in a sense, are getting squeezed from both sides as more content moves online.

A new startup named Syncbak hopes to enable those broadcast stations to take control of their own destinies and create their own streaming services, by offering a way for them to authenticate with local viewers and ensure that Internet-connected devices accessing that content belongs to households that can receive their over-the-air signals.

The startup was founded by Jack Perry, former CEO of Decisionmark, a company which provided software to Dish Network and DirecTV to authenticate local broadcast streams. For years, those satellite TV providers weren’t able to deliver local broadcast streams, until Decisionmark provided technology to determine which local signals to make available to different subscribers. And as we all know, finally having access to local news and sports helped grow the satellite TV business substantially.

In a similar fashion, by providing technology to ensure that a viewer is local, Syncback is opening the door to enable broadcasters to stream linear and on-demand video feeds in a way they previously couldn’t. The company sells a small rack-mounted server called a Syncbox that creates a closed transmission over broadcast spectrum and verifies that live content streamed over the web is only seen by those who can access it over the air. By authenticating, those local stations will be able to reach devices like Internet-connected TVs, or even smartphones and tablets, so long as those devices have connected through the same home network that the verified over-the-air device is on.

Syncbak spent the first year of its existence getting buy-in from broadcasters and ensuring it was working on a problem they wanted to solve. It spent the second year building the necessary proprietary hardware and software to create a verified stream. Now in its third year, Syncbak is working on getting its technology into local broadcast stations and also into consumer electronics devices.

Syncbak is currently in trials with about a dozen local broadcasters, and looks to have 50 participating stations by the end of the year. For the most part, those broadcasters are in early “friends and family” trials to see how the service could work. But Syncbak hopes that by next year’s CES, it will have its software embedded in devices like connected TVs. Even if it’s not embedded, the company has developed a dongle that can connect to the home network and authenticate with broadcasters.

Authentication opens up new potential revenue streams for local broadcasters, such as subscription or transactional business models. It also creates the ability for broadcasters to serve up local, hyper-local and otherwise targeted ads to run, increasing the potential CPMs they can charge local and national advertisers. Since programming is delivered via IP, the broadcasters also have detailed metrics for how viewers are watching shows that they can share with advertisers.

For all the possibilities Syncbak opens up for broadcasters, its business model depends on consumer adoption. The company aims to make money off of revenue share split with broadcasters, whether they make their money through subscription, transactional or ad sales.

Despite operating under the radar for the past two years, Syncbak has gotten some significant backing in that time. Strategic investors include industry groups like the National Association of Broadcasters and the Consumer Electronics Association. According to SEC filings, it has raised $4.2 million over two rounds of funding so far. With industry backing and a compelling message to broadcasters, Syncbak could power some interesting new services beginning soon. The question is if Syncbak and its broadcast partners can capture consumer attention.

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However, checking in this morning on the social media accompanying the series? Disappointing. NBC is accompanying the show with some video extra features as well as some social media — but the efforts range from mildly entertaining to flat-out disjointed.

Starting with the good: Going through the Twitter messages from characters after the fact is kinda fun, especially given whomever is responsible for the social media campaign went to the trouble of making an account for relatively random characters (who may hold bigger secrets).

They’ve also done a decent job of modeling the fictional President’s Twitter account after the real Barack Obama account. And the touch of syndicating the real Twitter accounts of the cast on the NBC site is nice.

But beyond that, all that’s on the horizon for web content is some yet-to-come video “deconstructing” the show as well as two different sites: The Event is Coming and TruthSeeker. Here’s where things get annoying.

TruthSeeker is a so-far unutilized blog and Twitter account promising to reveal secrets from within the Martinez administration; creator Nick Wauters told TV Squad that the character behind TruthSeeker is a character who appeared in the pilot, and whose identity will be revealed at a later date. That’s fine — but on the night of the premiere, there’s only one blog entry and three pretty weak Twitter updates. Anyone hoping for real substantive content will find themselves disappointed.

Meanwhile, The Event is Coming is an incoherent hodgepodge of blog entries from the show’s producers and “in-game” news articles about President Martinez and his campaign. The News section is particularly disastrous. While there are one or two interesting clues to be found here — if you dig a little, for example, you’ll find out that the Alaskan detention facility was originally built in 1944 — there’s no narrative logic to the site, no justification for why this data is available alongside musings from the show’s producer.

Overall, looking at what’s in place so far is disappointing when compared to the eight different social media components that ABC’s FlashForward launched with last year, some of which represented truly inspired and engaging interactivity. In fact, with so many good examples of transmedia campaigns built to support mainstream properties, there’s almost something offensive about how artless this is.

Then again, FlashForward got canceled, and it’s a bit early to give up on the show (if only because — spoilers! — I do want to know what happened to that airplane). So we’ll just have to see how things evolve.

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Erik Flannigan, EVP of digital media for MTV Networks, which counts Spike among its portfolio of channels, told me today during a phone conversation that this release window is part of Spike’s strategy to treat The Ultimate Fighter as an outcome-based reality show that is enjoyed best on TV. Flannigan also said that the window helps to bridge the off-season gap, but added that Spike could possibly add live streams of UFC fights to Ultimatefighter.com in the future.

Flannigan compared The Ultimate Fighter to Comedy Central hits like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, explaining that all of these formats have dedicated audiences and huge back catalogs that can’t be entirely monetized through DVD and download sales. Ad-supported content and ownership models could coexist, he said, but sales are just part of the picture for many Viacom properties. “You’re not gonna buy a box set of season 10 of the Daily Show,” he mused. “That just doesn’t make sense.”

Viacom made headlines recently when it pulled the Daily Show and the Colbert Report off of Hulu in favor of its own online destinations, a move that the media giant said was the result of being unsatisfied with the ad revenue it received from the online video sites. Flannigan told me today that his company is going to continue to look at distribution partnerships, but that it just makes more sense to have vertical sites for properties like The Ultimate Fighter, if only for the reason that some features won’t translate well to third-party sites. He cited as an example the annotation of Ultimatefighter.com, saying “It would be hard for someone to replicate (those features) somewhere else.”

Asked about the impact piracy is having on sports franchises like the UFC, Flannigan acknowledged that people dedicated enough would always be able to pirate content, be it via BitTorrent or other means. He didn’t think that live-streaming piracy was currently as big an issue for Spike TV as it might be for pay-per-view events, but he said Spike was open to exploring other ways to offer fans access to content. “Live events could easily be part of what we do in the future,” Flannigan told me, “just not in the present.”

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Perry also had another warning for the cable industry: Government has stepped in before to enforce competition and decouple infrastructure from services. The phone business went through this transition, and power companies have been facing similar regulations, he said. Could cable be next? Will Congress eventually force cable companies to open up their pipes for competitors to sell programming? “It certainly happened to many other businesses,” he mused.

Of course, cable isn’t the only gatekeeper in this newteevee world. Device makers increasingly hold the key to over the top platforms, deciding which services to include and which to leave out. So how will Panasonic deal with this responsibility? I decided to find out and ask Perry a few more questions.

Perry acknowledged the role cable TV has to play in the future of video distribution, but also said that consumers are increasingly treating it like a dumb pipe to run over-the-top video services, which could eventually solve the problem of decoupling without any regulation. So what does cable need to do to keep its customers from cutting the cord? Unbundle programming, he said, and offer choice without unnecessary barriers like cumbersome content protection. “The average consumer doesn’t want to steal content,” he told me. “The average consumer wants convenience and flexibility.”

Speaking of choice: Panasonic has started to incorporate various over-the-top services into its devices through its Viera Cast platform, which Perry described as a walled garden. He told the audience of the TV of Tomorrow Show that Panasonic might eventually move towards an open platform. At one point, he even predicted that it would be “no question that there’s eventually (going to be) browsers on TVs.” Perry was a little more careful when I wanted to know a few more details, but he did tell me that Panasonic will try to offer as much content and choice as possible. “We are not trying to funnel or control the consumer,” he added.

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Robo.to’s main function is simple — a place to post clips that are sort of a webcam status message, with no sound and a time limit of 4 seconds. You can use the GIF-like autoplaying video Robo.to creates for you as a sort of avatar that displays your most recent mood or location — or that’s the idea anyway, as compared with Seesmic (which doesn’t really do video anymore) or 12seconds, which use video clips more conversationally.

The new Robo.to TV mode stitches updates together, either as a selection of members or sorted by metadata. (Check out the #everyone example video embedded above.) I’m not really sure if Robo.to TV is an art project or a product, and Particle co-founder and CTO Aubrey Anderson said that’s yet to be determined by seeing how people use it. So far, Robo.to itself is proving to be rather popular — in part because investor Justin Timberlake is already a built-in celebrity spokesman. Particle CEO Rey Flemings said Robo.to has had 20,000 active users, 100,000 videos, and 375,000 visitors in the last month, and it only launched in May.

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eduFire is an educational marketplace where students can take classes via live web video. The company has expanded beyond its initial focus on learning languages to offer classes in standardized test preparation and technology training. eduFire CEO Jon Bischke says that while languages are still the most popular topic on the site, classes on how to use Facebook and Twitter are catching on with audiences.

Bischke said the company is also seeing an emergence of almost-real-time classes. For instance, when protesters were marching in Iran earlier this year, classes on the modern history of Iran started popping up on the site.

Launched a little over a year ago, eduFire says it now has roughly 5,000 teachers and that 30,000 students have signed up so far. The company rolled out a “SuperPass” earlier this year, which lets students take unlimited classes for $29 a month. eduFire has five employees and previously raised half a million dollars in angel funding.

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Well, it seems Stockholm also has produced Spotify’s video equivalent, Voddler. Similarly, Voddler offers a downloadable app for ad-supported and paid streaming. (It beta-launched this summer, and a public debut in Sweden is due this fall). Voddler is notable for its high-quality streams at a low cost — apparently it goes up to 1080p (if a user can receive 8Mbps). But only some 1,500 testers are using the product today.

The company says it has 100,000 people waiting to receive beta invites. It looks like a secondary market for invites has already sprung up (see the “exclusive preview” video below promoting one such site), and forum readers are gobbling up posted screenshots.

Voddler exclusive preview – Watch more Funny Videos

With Boxee signing content deals, Vudu getting onto TVs, television distributors set to launch “TV Everywhere” subscriber content streaming, and many other similar efforts, Voddler’s not exactly stepping into a void. And the service strikes me as eerily similar to Joost, the highly anticipated Dutch P2P app that flopped due to technology problems, competitions, and in large part because of its small content library.

Information about Voddler’s content deals is strikingly absent from all the hype, though published screenshots include newly released Hollywood movies. Voddler has been telling the press (in Swedish) it will charge per view for first-run movies at the same time they are released to theaters. Perhaps the timing is right to get massive international next-generation TV and movie distribution rights…but perhaps not.

Voddler has actually been around since 2005 and has about 30 employees across offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and Beijing. It looks like the company has raised about $16 million from investors including Deseven Capital, Freja Ventures and Lotsa SA, according to SEC filings.

Voddler debuted a previous concept that emphasized bringing ad-supported content to the living room at a video startup face-off I moderated in 2007, where it received mellow interest. At the time, the company bragged it had “the world’s largest secure disk-array.” Voddler recently told OnSoftware it’s still looking to sell a Voddler box.

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Pixorial works like this. If your video is already digital, you can upload it directly, if it’s stored on an old reel of film, a VHS tape or any number of different physical media, you send it via UPS to the Pixorial offices, where the company digitizes it. Once it’s been uploaded you get a link where you can view or edit the footage online. The resulting edited clip can then be shared online or you can purchase a DVD or hi-res download of it.

All the editing tools are online, and even better, you can invite others to collaborate on a video, so users can mix and match memories to create a whole new experience.

I had a couple of old VHS tapes that I hadn’t looked at in ages (I don’t even remember when I last had a VHS player). Pixorial let me test out the service and it worked as promised. I shipped off my tape, they digitized it and I spent a good part of one afternoon laughing at my much younger self and editing out the most embarrassing bits. Embedded is video from 1990 of me on a college bowl-style show called Quizzard that ran locally on Honolulu’s KHNL 13. No, that’s not me doing the rap — but that is my mullet, and those are my braces.

Though seeing those old Quizzard episodes is worth more than gold to some, Pixorial makes actual money through a few different revenue streams. The company offers a pro account for $25 a year, which has no archive limit, free accounts cap at 10GB and have ads. Pixorial also charges to digitize those old analog videos, and charges if you want a hi-res download (.99 cents), DVD ($10) or Mosaic ($20) of your video.

Pixorial isn’t alone in the personal video sharing space. Motionbox offers much of the same services.

Located in Denver, Colorado, Pixorial was founded in 2007. The company is privately funded and has 11 employees.

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Indy 500 race day on May 24 merited 36,514 streams, a new record for its production team, including 8,000 concurrent streams for the majority of the race. But by comparison, NBC and USOpen.com had more than 4 million streams of the U.S. Open in golf last year, and CBSSports.com and the USOpen.org had 300,000 users for last year’s tennis final (both events were helped by being on a Monday, when people were at work). The web broadcast of March Madness had 7.52 million unique visitors this year.

We talked with Jarrod Krisiloff, director of multimedia platforms at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions, to get a better idea of Indy 500′s approach to the web.

Since the race was shown for free on broadcast TV on Memorial Day weekend, the Indy 500 webcast didn’t exactly fill a massive unserved need. The webcast itself was a poor man’s version of the broadcast production, however. Where the broadcast utilized 65 cameras, including 12 in-car, as well as commentators, pit reporters and graphics, the web version had four in-car cameras and a helicopter view of the track. “The user really drives the experience,” said Krisiloff (who of course would choose that metaphor!). But he admitted, “It’s difficult for people to understand the broadcast rights. “The fans think the fans should be served.”

In past years, a company called MediaZone bought rights to stream the race for a $9.99 fee, but Krisiloff said IMS was forced to look elsewhere when MediaZone went out of business (according to the company’s former PR firm it slimmed down its offerings and moved to South Africa). This year, IMS used a pieced-together solution that included encoding from Inlet Technologies and streaming from Conviva for four races (so far) including the Indy 500, as well as other events such as press conferences and banquets.

“It was by far the most successful event we had for the application,” said Krisiloff. But since the streams were offered for free (with registration) and did not feature advertising, success just meant no conked-out feeds, video encoding issues or major lost data from cars. The only hiccup was when car telemetry was lost after antennas broke in an accident. And stuff like that just adds to the feeling that you’re in the thick of the action.

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First of all, let’s talk about where things ended up last year. The big news items for video startups (and young, internal ventures at big companies) in 2008 were acquisitions, layoffs and shut-downs — and of course fundings. Many of the companies we cover raised funding last year, though the pace of new investments slowed along with the economy. (As for including a category for IPOs…yeah right.) To recap some of the highlights (and lowlights):

Acquisitions: There were no blockbuster acquisitions in 2008 — at this point it seems impossible that anyone will ever match 2006′s Google-YouTube. At $160 million, Yahoo-Maven was probably the biggest deal that’s directly relevant to our space, but that deal has faded, along with the products involved. Other than a couple biggies on this list, you’ll be forgiven if you hardly recognize any of the names.

Vidmeter by Visible Measures, NBCU buys LX.TV, Maven Networks by Yahoo, Revver by LiveUniverse, Weblistic by Spot Runner, Bebo (the social network has significant investment in original video) by AOL, MediaXstream by Secure Media Solutions, Kontiki by MK Capital, FanLib by Disney, CNET (which has many video assets) by CBS Interactive, Navic by Microsoft, Omnisio by Google/YouTube, Radiance Technologies by Comcast Media Center, Visual Connection by KIT Digital, Illumenix by TubeMogul, ClearStory by The FeedRoom, SportVU by STATS, TIOTI by Vizimo

Layoffs: These stories sped up considerably as the year went on. Most, if not all, failed to put an end to tough times for the companies involved.

Digeo, Crackle, MeeVee, Akimbo, SuperDeluxe, Vudu, Seesmic (twice), Heavy, PermissionTV, ManiaTV, Break, Revision3, Smashface, 60Frames, Vuze, Spot Runner (twice), Veoh (twice), BitTorrent (twice), Current Media, Qik, Strands, Brightcove and DivX. (Not to mention public companies like TiVo, Netflix, Akamai, Viacom, NBCU, Adobe and AT&T.)

Shut down: This category was actually smaller than we might have expected, given how tough it is to succeed in this business. Last year, when we asked a panel of online video experts — from video makers to professors to VCs and media execs — what would happen in 2008, one of the most common answers was that me-too video sites would shut down. Here’s what they told us:

• “If you are running an online video company that features non-premium, commodity content and you missed the Internet ‘network effect’ enjoyed by YouTube and a few others, it might be time to cash out.”
• “Sadly, the second-tier video sites this year will sell to larger companies or fade away.”
• “Any of the companies who have raised $15 million or more and are running out of funds now are in serious danger.”

Well, it turns out doomsday wasn’t quite nigh… But it’s a good bet that many of the startups on the layoffs list will be forced to make even deeper cuts in 2009.

Stage6 (DivX’s video portal), Akimbo, Firebrand, AllPeers, Peerflix, Streamcast Networks, Pickle (after being acquired by Scripps), Red Swoosh (after being acquired by Akamai), SanDisk’s Fanfare and TakeTV, Starz Entertainment’s online service Vongo, Skyrider, ClickStar, Moblogic (after CBS acquired Wallstrip), Mobuzz, Jumpcut (after being acquired by Yahoo), Eyespot (though the assets were acquired by PixelFish),

But people are watching more and more online video, from user-generated video to TV episodes to a growing portion of web video originals. Here are the consumption stats:

Unfortunately, global video stats are hard to come by, but here’s one impressive measure of how much video has infiltrated our lives: comScore says U.S. online video watchers watched 273.1 minutes of online video in the month of November 2008, up from 195 minutes in November 2007. And the number was only 151 minutes in January 2007. A 40 percent increase in consumption in a single year is massive, and there’s no reason to think it will go away.

And what about the money? Here’s what we’re looking at for market size:

eMarketer has been looking at video advertising revenue closely. First it said 2008 would net $1.3 billion in U.S. video ad revenue, but then halfway through the year it revised that estimate to $505 million. By the end of the year, that number was bumped up to $587 million. Notwithstanding the whole “track record” thing, here’s this year’s eMarketer forecast: $850 million in U.S. online video ads 2009.

As for paid video, it’s the red-headed step-child of video business models — but it’s also being opened up in new ways by services like Netflix, which includes unlimited online streaming with most of its physical DVD rental plans, and sports services like the exemplary MLB.tv. ABI Research forecasts $2.49 billion in worldwide — N.B. worldwide, not just U.S.! — revenue for paid video over broadband, more than double the $1.16 billion it estimated for 2008.

So what’s next on the agenda? I am generally uncomfortable with predictions, given how self-serving they are (plus I hate to be obvious or wrong). But here are some of the most provocative and specific video-related predictions I’ve seen from people who take an active interest in the space.

• Rise of video use by marketers for SEO — “a short cut to the top of Google” (Kevin Nalty)
• Growing market for cheap video stock footage (Robin Good)
• Influence of video on politics deepens with President Elect Barack Obama’s fireside chats (Alex Castro)
• Closure of most of the startups on this list: Revision3, ON Networks, NextNewNetworks, 23/6, Funny or Die — “Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.” (Rex Sorgatz)
• “The biggest trend in online video is where and on what people will watch” (Hulu CEO Jason Kilar). Is this a smoke signal given the source? Hulu was the break-out story of 2008, but it’s only available on the web right now. Meanwhile, the push to bring web content to the TV, driven by Netflix, is gearing up to be a prominent storyline in 2009.

So, there you have it, a cornucopia of data points and pointers. Of course, when it all comes down to it, silly things like founder dynamics, funders’ indulgence, and luck will likely have as much a part in your success or failure as the market. What’s sad is that we may not see a lot of new startups this year, just at a time when some of the best ideas about online video are being crystallized into shows, products and services that people actually want and enjoy. But if you’re lucky enough to have a little runway left, we hope to see you out there.

Photo by Flickr user dierken.

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